The two ships, pursuer and pursued, quaintly shaped, with heavy, flapping sails, lay apparently becalmed in a sort of natural basin formed by the junction of two silently flowing, turgid rivers—rivers whose water was thick and oily, yellow in colour, unpleasant to look at. The country through which they passed was swamp-riven and desolate, though in the far distance were rice fields and the curiously fashioned roofs of a Chinese village. The sun beat down upon the glasslike water. The air was windless. Further movement seemed impossible until from the smaller boat, through unexpectedly opened hatches, half a dozen oars were suddenly thrust into the water. The huge Chinaman who stood at the helm, yellow-skinned and naked to the waist, picked up an enormous pole and let it gradually down into the river bed. The oars, languidly though they were wielded, cut the water, and the dhow began slowly to move. Wu Abst, the Mighty Terror of the Great River, as he loved to hear himself described, grinned mockingly as he looked backwards towards his pursuer. He shouted words through the glistening heat intended to convey his contempt of those who fancied that he was to be caught napping. Then he bent over his giant pole and glanced with satisfaction at the distant bank, which already showed signs of their progress. At the bend of the river, not three miles distant, was a stretch of water into which no such craft as that which had chased him could follow. He relit his pipe, therefore, and smoked like a man at peace, whilst below the sweat rolled from the naked bodies of the men who were emulating their Roman predecessors of two thousand years ago. Wu Abst, pleased with their efforts, shipped his pole for a moment, and, leaning over the side, shouted encouragement and exhortation to the toilers. Then suddenly the words died away upon his lips. His whole frame stiffened. The remains of the grin faded from his face, the whole expression of which was now almost ludicrously changed. For across that little stretch of river came the horrible sound of which he had heard, the pop-pop-pop denoting the use of some devil-made mechanical contrivance, which triumphed over windless airs and opposing currents.
His horrified gaze became fastened upon the pursuing ship, now also moving, and not only moving, but moving very much faster than anything which all the efforts of his toiling gang were able to accomplish. Bewilderment gave place to anger, which in its turn became merged almost at once in the philosophy of his race—the graveyard of all emotions! He shouted an order to those down below. There was a clatter and a rumble as the men shipped their oars, and another more metallic sound as they exchanged them for other weapons.
Wu Abst thrust his hand through the window of a small cuddy hole, which he called his cabin, and drew out a long, antiquated rifle. It was one of a type manufactured in Birmingham fifty years ago, rejected since then by every South American band of patriots planning a revolution, and scoffed at even by West African savages. He nevertheless dropped a cartridge into its place and waited whilst the other ship glided almost alongside. His eyes swept its deck, and his bloodthirsty intentions were promptly changed. With expressionless face he slipped his weapon back again through the cuddy hole and called down another order below. Then he leaned over the rail and raised his hand in salute. A man who was seated aft in a basket chair upon the deck of the approaching ship, rose to his feet and came to the side. He wore Chinese garb and he spoke in Chinese, but his linen clothes were spotlessly white and he wore no pigtail.
“Are you Wu Abst, the river pirate?” he called out.
“I am Wu Abst,” was the reply. “And who are you?”
“I am Wu Ling, the peaceful trader,” the other answered. “I bring prosperity to those whom you seek to rob.”
Wu Abst spat into the river.
“I know of you,” he growled. “You trade with foreign money. You take the jade and the gems, the silk and the handiwork of these people and sell them rubbish.”
“Where I take,” the other rejoined, “I give something in return, which is more than you do.”
“What is your business with me?” Wu Abst demanded, glancing sullenly at the two Maxim guns trained upon him, behind each of which was seated, cross-legged, a brawny and capable-looking Chinese sailor.
“Last night,” Wu Ling announced, “I traded at the village of Hyest, and I heard a strange tale. I heard that you had on board your ship a foreigner tied with ropes, and that you were waiting to reach your own stretches to throw him to the crocodiles. Is this the truth, Wu Abst, or am I to search your ship?”
“It is the truth,” the other admitted grimly. “He is a foreign devil who merits death and even torture. He is a thief and a sacrilegious pest upon the earth.”
“You speak hard words of him,” Wu Ling observed.
“What words other than hard can be spoken of such?” Wu Abst retorted. “Presently I shall tell you of his deeds. I like not your speech, Wu Ling. You speak our tongue but speak it strangely. There are rumours of you in many places. There are some who say that not only is the money with which you trade the money of foreign devils, but that you, too, are one of them in spirit if not by birth.”
“What I am is none of the present business,” Wu Ling declared. “What of this prisoner of yours?”
“I shall speak of him now,” Wu Abst answered. “Then, if you are indeed a man of this country, you shall see that I do no evil thing in casting him to the crocodiles. He was caught, a thief in the sacred temple of the sacred village of Nilkaya, in the temple where the Great Emperor himself was used to worship. The priests who caught him tied his body with ropes—not I. They brought him to the riverside, and they gave me silver to deal with him.”
“Your story is true,” Wu Ling admitted. “The circumstances you relate are known to me. But there were two of these robbers. What of the other, his companion?”
“The priests say that he escaped, and with him the two sacred Images of the great God, reverenced for nine hundred years,” the pirate confided. “It is because of the escape of the other that they wish to make sure of the death of this one.”
Wu Ling considered for a moment.
“Wu Abst,” he pronounced at last, “you have told me a true story, and you have acted in this matter as a just man. Therefore these guns of mine shall bring no message of evil to you, nor shall I declare war, so long as you keep to your side of the river and above the villages where I trade. But as for the foreign devil, you must hand him over to me.”
Wu Abst raised his hands to heaven. For a time his speech was almost incomprehensible. He was stricken with a fit of anger. He shouted and pleaded until he foamed at the mouth. Wu Ling listened unmoved. When at last there was silence he spoke.
“It is clear to me what you intended, Wu Abst,” he said. “There was to be torture and more silver from the priests before you cast this prisoner to the sea fish.”
“It is a hard living that one makes nowadays,” Wu Abst, the Terror of the River, muttered.
“Nevertheless in this matter I am firm,” the other insisted. “Hand me over the foreigner and go your way. You know of me. I travel into dangerous places when I leave my ship, and I have a score of men below who could hew their way through a regiment of your cutthroats, and a gun in the bows there which would send you to the bottom with a single discharge. I am your master, Wu Abst, and I command. Bring me the foreigner and go your way.”
So, a few minutes later, a half-naked, barely conscious, young Englishman, the remains of his garments rags upon his back, blue in the face from lack of circulation, a hideous and pitiful sight, was carried up from the hold of Wu Abst’s sailing dhow and laid upon the deck of the trading schooner of Wu Ling. His cords were cut, brandy and water were poured down his throat, a sail reared as a shelter from the sun, whilst from a small hose, cool, refreshing water was sprayed over him until consciousness returned and speech began to stammer from his lips. Then, from the petrol engine, commenced once more the noise which had brought consternation to Wu Abst. The ship swung round in a circle and passed on its way down the river. Wu Abst, with a little shrug of the shoulders, relit his pipe. Perhaps, after all, there would have been no more silver!
That evening seemed to the released man like a foretaste of paradise. He lay on a couch in Wu Ling’s cabin, with the roof and sides rolled back and nothing but a cunning arrangement of mosquito netting between him and the violet twilight. Above was the moon and the brilliantly starlit night; on either side occasional groves of trees—trees growing almost down to the river’s edge, some with poisonous odours, others almost sickly sweet. Sometimes there was a light from a distant village, but more often they were enveloped in a thick, velvety darkness. And they were pointing for the great port at the mouth of the river, and safety. The released man was sipping brandy and water, and smoking. His host sat opposite him, grave and enigmatic.
“I talk English little,” Wu Ling said, “but I understand all. Speak your story, and tell how called.”
The young man raised himself slightly.
“My name is Gregory Ballaston,” he announced. “I am an Englishman, as you know, a traveller and fond of adventure. For years this story of the temple of Nilkaya has been in my brain. I heard all about it from some one who lived in Pekin for many years.”
“The story?” Wu Ling enquired politely.
“In this temple,” the young man narrated, “is a great statue of a Chinese god—Buddha, I suppose—and on either side of it are two smaller ones made from hard wood, marvellously carved, and, some say, a thousand years old. Each is supposed to be a counterpart of the greater God, and yet they demonstrate an amazingly presented allegory. They bear a likeness to one another, they bear a likeness to the God himself, but each is curiously different. In one you seem to trace the whole of the evil qualities which could ever enter into the character of man, and in the other, all the good qualities. One is hideous and the other beautiful. Yet, if you put them side by side and glance quickly from one to the other, the two seem to grow together so that the impression of the Image which is left in your mind is that of the great God above. They are called the Body and the Soul.”
“This story I have heard,” Wu Ling admitted.
“I have heard it many times, but I scarcely believed it—until I saw,” the young man continued. “I had only a few minutes in the temple and there was danger all around, yet for a moment they took my breath away. I could scarcely move. Why, the man who fashioned them might have been an oriental Phidias.”
“Proceed,” Wu Ling begged.
“Well, the point of the story is this. Generations ago there was a great rising amongst the people, an invasion from the north, and robbers seem to have overrun the whole place. They sacked even the temples, and the priests—those who had warning of their coming—stripped their robes and their temples of all the precious stones which they possessed, and hid them.”
“Hid them,” Wu Ling repeated. “Ah!”
“Some of this story, you have, of course, heard,” the young man went on, “because your trade brings you, I suppose, within a hundred miles of Nilkaya. The temples were rich in jewels—the emperors of China had sent them gifts for centuries—and the legend is that all the most valuable were concealed within these two Images—the Body and the Soul.”
“That,” Wu Ling commented, “is a strange story.”
“As I told you,” the young man continued, “I heard it from one who lived in Pekin and I believe that it is the truth. For centuries the priests have possessed a manuscript which has been handed down from one High Priest to the other, and this manuscript tells how these Images have been fashioned, so that there is within them a hollow place. There are directions for finding it, and for opening the Images, and they say that without these directions no man in the world could guess how to do it. I have spoken with one who has visited the temple, and who was not quite so much pressed for time as I was, who has seen these Images only a few feet away, and who insists upon it that there is not a sign of any possible aperture or any break in the wood.”
“A simple thing,” Wu Ling suggested blandly, “would be to break with choppers.”
The young man raised his eyebrows.
“It is strange to hear you, a Chinaman, propose such a thing,” he remarked. “I suppose any one who attempted it in this country would sooner or later be cut into small pieces, for these Images are blessed just as the larger one. But there is another reason against attempting such a thing. You are a very wonderful race, you Chinese, and you were more wonderful still, generations ago.”
“Ah!” Wu Ling murmured.
“There are plenty of people,” the young man proceeded, “who say that there is scarcely a discovery in the world which you have not anticipated and then declined to use because the central tenet of your religion and your philosophy was to leave things that are. Well, they say that you discovered gunpowder and all manner of explosives about the time these Images were fashioned. They must always, from the first, have been intended for a possible hiding place, for the old legend concerning them—I know this from the only European who has ever visited the temple—declared that if these are subjected to violence in any way, then the earthquake follows. The priests all believe this implicitly, and, although it sounds a far-fetched idea, the man who first told me the story is convinced that when the jewels were stored away inside, they were imbedded in some sort of explosive.”
“It becomes more than ever a strange story,” Wu Ling said didactically.
The young man looked searchingly for a moment at his host. Was it his fancy, he wondered, or was there a faint note of sardonic disbelief in his even tone?
“Of course,” he went on, “it must sound to you, as it does to me, although you would scarcely understand the word, like rot, but the man from whom I heard it was a great person in Pekin, a friend even of the Emperor, and not only of the Emperor, but of the Emperor’s great adviser whom some people think the greatest Chinaman who ever lived. He had privileges which had never before been extended to any European.”
Wu Ling nodded gravely.
“So,” he said, with the painstaking air of one trying to solve a problem, “you were seeking to take Images from temple, away from priests to whom belong, that you might possess jewels.”
The young man coughed. Somehow or other Wu Ling’s eyes were very penetrating.
“Well,” he admitted, “I suppose in a way it was robbery, but robbery on a legitimate scale. I don’t suppose you’ve read much European history, have you?”
“Read never,” Wu Ling replied.
“That makes it difficult to explain,” his companion regretted, pausing for a moment to breathe in, with great satisfaction, a gulp of the cool night air. “However, most of the territories in different parts of the world which England possesses and a great deal of her inherited wealth, have come because centuries ago Englishmen went across the seas to every country in the world and helped themselves to pretty well what they wanted.”
“That,” Wu Ling remarked, “sounds like Wu Abst, the pirate.”
Gregory Ballaston smiled.
“Well,” he continued, “the invasion of a foreign country for purposes of aggrandisement is robbery, I suppose, only, you see, it is robbery on a big scale. We looked at this present affair in the same way. If it is true that there are a million pounds’ worth of jewels in these images, what good can they possibly do to any one hidden there for centuries? No one could see them. No one could derive any good from them. Their very beauty is lost to the world. Robbery, if you like, Wu Ling, but not petty larceny.”
Wu Ling shook his head with an uncomprehending smile.
“Of course you won’t understand that,” the other observed. “Still, what I mean to say is, that the very danger of the exploit, the fact that you risk your life—look how near I came to losing mine!—makes the enterprise almost worth while. Nothing mean about it, anyway.”
“Ah!” Wu Ling murmured meditatively. “And now please tell, where Images?”
The young man was silent.
“That’s a long story, Wu Ling,” he sighed. “There were two of us in this. The other got away. He didn’t desert me exactly. It was according to plan, but he had to leave first, and he left damned quick.”
“And the Images?” Wu Ling persisted softly.
Gregory Ballaston leaned back. The night had become a thing of splendour, the water, no longer yellow, but glittering with the reflection of the moon. They were passing through a narrow strip of country which might have been the garden of some great nobleman’s palace. There were flowering shrubs down to the river’s edge, a faint perfume of almond blossom, in the distance a stronger scent of something like eucalyptus, and all the time a divine silence. After his terrible quarters in the pirate ship this was a dream of luxury. The young man was full of gratitude to his benefactor, and yet he hesitated. Could one trust any Chinaman, even though he has saved one’s life, with a secret like this?
“The Images no longer stand in the Temple, Wu Ling,” he said, “but just where they are now I do not know. It was my part of the affair—if you understand military language—to fight a rearguard action. I did, but there were too many of them for me. They fought like furies, those priests. I might have killed them, but I hadn’t the heart to do it. I shot one or two in the limbs, and then chucked it when I saw it was no use. Whether my friend succeeded in getting away with the Images or not, I shall not know for many days.”
They passed a tiny village. From a plastered house with a curving roof, two lanterns were hanging. A girl’s figure was dimly visible through the strings of thin bamboo, rustling musically together in the breeze. She was singing to a kind of guitar, an amazing melody, uncouth in its way, and unintelligible. Yet the young man turned over and smiled as he listened.
“Is there no other thing but money to be desired amongst you of the West,” Wu Ling asked, “that even in youth you risk so much?”
Gregory Ballaston clasped his hands behind his head. He was gazing steadily up at the stars, listening to the melody dying away in the distance. Although he addressed his companion, he had the air of one soliloquising.
“The further West you go, Wu Ling,” he said, “the more you need money to taste life. Artistically, of course, it’s all wrong, but then the world’s all wrong. It’s slipped out of shape somehow, during the last thousand years. We aren’t natural any longer. The natural person accepts pleasure, but doesn’t seek it. Directly you seek, you begin a terrible chase, and we’re all seekers over westward, Wu Ling. We have lost the art of being. We have lost the gift of repose. We have lost the capacity for quiet enjoyments. Sport, ambitions and love-making have all joined in the débâcle. No one man can live alone and away from his fellows, even if he sees into the evil of these things. All life to us has come to run on wheels which need always the oil of money.”
“And for the chance of gaining that,” Wu Ling murmured, “you young Englishmen have come so far and risked your lives.”
The young man looked round the cabin and beyond. There was a rack of rifles against the wall, boxes of ammunition which reached to the ceiling. The moonlight outside glinted now and then upon the muzzles of the Maxims.
“You yourself, Wu Ling,” he pointed out, “run risks. For what? For the same thing. For wealth. You wouldn’t carry those firearms unless you had trouble sometimes. You are past the time of life when an adventure alone appeals. You too seek wealth, and you seek it with Maxim guns and Enfield rifles to protect yourself.”
“There are evil men upon the river,” Wu Ling admitted. “There are men like Abst and others, but these are for protection. We have a proverb in this country—‘The strong man only is safe.’”
“A wise saying,” the young man acknowledged drowsily.
Wu Ling rose to his feet.
“Our guest must sleep,” he said. “Soon the night will be cold and they will draw coverings over the netting.”
“I’m awfully afraid I’m turning you out of your quarters,” Gregory Ballaston apologised.
“I have others,” was the courteous reply. “It is for sleep I leave you.”
He passed out and, walking to the stern of the boat, stood pensively watching a little streak of silver left behind. Forward the young man slept—slept as he had never hoped to do again in this world. All through the night they made lazy progress towards the great city which fringed the ocean.
Wu Ling, the trader, Chinese representative of the great house of Johnson and Company, at home and amongst his merchandise, was strangely installed. He sat in the remote corner of a huge warehouse, packed from floor to ceiling with an amazingly heterogeneous collection of all manner of articles. There were bales of cotton and calico goods from Manchester, woollens from Bradford, cases of firearms from Birmingham, and six great crates of American bicycles in the foreground. A Ford automobile stood in the middle of the floor, and, farther back, in the recesses of the room, which seemed to be of no particular shape, and which wandered into many corners, were piles of Chinese silks, shelf after shelf of china bowls and ivory statuettes. Hanging from the walls were mandarins’ robes of green and blue, embroidered with many-coloured silks, fragments of brocade, and one great pictorial representation of the grounds of an emperor’s palace, woven with miraculous skill into a background of pale blue material. From the more distant parts of the warehouse came an insidious, pungent odour, as of a perfume from which the life had gone but the faintness of which remained; a perfume which spread itself with gentle insistence into every corner of the place and seemed to envelop even its more sordid details with an air of mystery. In the great open yard, blue-smocked Chinamen were packing and unpacking in amazing silence. The only sound in the warehouse itself came from the clicking of a typewriter before which, on a plain deal bench, was seated a black-haired, sallow-faced youth in European clothes. From outside, there drifted in through the open window, in a confused medley, the strange noises of the quay, the patter of naked feet, the shrill cry of the porters and occasional screech of a siren. A white mist hung over the harbour; a hot, damp mist, concealing in patches the tangled mass of shipping....
Into this curious chamber of commerce, ushered by a Chinese boy, came Gregory Ballaston, the Englishman whom Wu Ling had rescued a short while ago. The Chinese boy murmured something and departed. Wu Ling nodded a welcome to his visitor—a grave, reserved welcome.
“No gone England yet,” he observed.
The young man sank into the chair which the other’s gesture indicated. He had evidently found his clothes, for he was very correctly dressed in the European fashion. His manner was self-possessed and his voice level. Nevertheless his pallor was almost ghastly and there were still blue lines under his eyes. He had the air of a man who has been through some form of suffering.
“You have heard the story of my friend, Wu Ling?” he asked.
The Chinaman shook his head and pointed around.
“Much affairs,” he explained. “Very busy. Smoke cigarette?”
Gregory Ballaston helped himself from the open box.
“My friend got away,” he recounted; “reached Pekin and got safely on to the train. At some God-forsaken place on the way here, the train was held up. There seems to have been confusion for an hour or so. When the soldiers arrived, my friend was found with his throat cut, and the Chinaman who had been his guide and interpreter was killed too.”
Wu Ling inclined his head gravely. The story was not an unusual one.
“Robbers in China are bad men,” he declared. “And the Images?”
The young Englishman touched his forehead. The heat was great and there were drops of moisture upon his fingers.
“One was still amongst the train baggage,” he confided. “It is now safely on board the steamer. The other was taken away by the robbers.”
Wu Ling reflected for several moments, looking downward upon the table. He seemed indisposed for speech, and presently his visitor continued.
“Of course,” he went on, “according to the superstition, one is supposed to be worthless without the other. I am going to risk that, however. Mine is under lock and key in the purser’s safe, and I sha’n’t even look at it until we’re well out of these seas.”
“The steamer sail at four o’clock to-morrow,” Wu Ling remarked, glancing at a chart.
The young man nodded.
“I have been on board already,” he said. “I came back to pay my promised call upon you and to thank you once more for all you did for me.”
Wu Ling waved his hand.
“It was nothing,” he declared. “Wu Abst, bad man. If he had killed you, there would have been trouble on the river. My trading all disturbed. You safe now. Better leave the Image behind.”
“I’m damned if I do,” was the emphatic reply. “It’s cost my pal’s life and very nearly mine. I am going to stick to it.”
Wu Ling was thoughtful. Apparently he was watching some of the porters at work in a distant corner of the warehouse.
“Which Image you have?” he enquired. “Body or Soul?”
“I haven’t undone the case,” the young man answered. “I don’t care which it is, so long as the jewels are in it.”
“You think you get the jewels?” Wu Ling asked gently.
“If they are there, I shall,” was the dogged reply. “Superstitions are all very well in a way, but a wooden image is a wooden image, after all.”
Wu Ling said nothing. There was a curious significance about his silence which seemed somehow to embarrass his visitor, who rose presently to his feet and looked around. He was inspired with a desire to change the conversation.
“What an amazing place this is!” he exclaimed. “I suppose you have some wonderful Chinese things.”
“We spend life collecting them,” Wu Ling answered. “In return you see what we give,” pointing to the bales of calico and woollen goods and the crates of bicycles. “Perhaps you care buy some curios?”
Gregory Ballaston shook his head.
“No money,” he confessed. “I shall have to get a credit from the purser as it is.”
Wu Ling rose slowly to his feet.
“Come,” he enjoined. “I show you something. Follow!”
The young man, not altogether willing, followed his guide to the extreme end of that amazing warehouse, through a recess into a further dark room also filled with a strange conglomeration of articles from which seemed to come with even more troublous insistence the same curious odour, lifeless yet disturbing. Beyond was still another door towards which Wu Ling made his way. His companion hesitated.
“I have not a great deal of time,” he said. “I want to see the Consul before the place closes.”
“You have time to see what I shall show,” was the almost ominous rejoinder.
They paused before the door which, to Ballaston’s surprise, was studded with great nails and of enormous strength. Wu Ling produced a long, thin key from his pocket, which he inserted into a very modern-looking aperture. The door swung ponderously open. Inside there was no window, nor apparently any form of ventilation, and again that odour, cloying and nauseating, swept out in stabbing little wafts, almost stupefying. The young man, confronted with a pool of darkness, would have drawn back, but there was suddenly a grip upon his arm like a ring of iron.
“Wait!” Wu Ling ordered. “There shall be light.”
And immediately there was. From some unseen switch the dark chamber was flooded with the illumination of many electric bulbs. Ballaston gasped as he looked around. It was almost as though he had found his way into some Aladdin’s cave. On shelves of red, highly polished wood were ranged lumps of jade and quartz, bowls of ancient china of which even his inexperience could gauge the pricelessness, silk coats, faded but marvellously embroidered, barbaric stones in open trays, a great circlet of Malay pearls, and, on a shelf alone, staring at him, bland and unmistakable, the other of the twin Images which he and his friend had dragged down from their pedestals in the Temple. Ballaston stared at it speechless. The face itself had a touch of sphinxlike mysticism, the remoteness of a god, the benevolence of a kindly spirit. The work in it seemed so slight; the result so prodigious. Ballaston found words at last.
“The other Image!” he cried. “Where did you get it?”
“In this city,” Wu Ling explained, “nothing of this sort is sold unless it come first to us. Three nights since there appeared a messenger. I sought the man from whom he came at his hiding place in the city. With him I traded for the Image.”
“You purchased it!” the young man gasped.
“Whom else?” was the composed reply. “In this country, from the dark forests of Northern Mongolia, the temples of Pekin, or the mines on the Siberian borders, all that there is for which men seek gold comes here. We pay. They sell.”
“But you can’t keep it,” Ballaston exclaimed, “not in this country. The priests will hear. You will be forced to return it. If it belongs to any one——”
He stopped short. Wu Ling read his thoughts and smiled.
“The priests of the temple, which you and your accomplice ravaged,” he announced, “live no longer. They were murdered by the people many days ago, for their sin in permitting you to enter the temple. Furthermore, the Images are now defiled. The hand of the foreigner has touched them. They can never again take their place by the side of the Great Buddha. You bought with blood, and I with gold.”
There was the sound of shuffling footsteps close at hand. An elderly man, dressed in shabby European clothes, stood behind them. He looked over their shoulders at the Image, and there was for a moment almost a glow in his worn and lined face.
“This,” Wu Ling confided, “is a man of your race. He is of the firm—a partner—not because of business, but because he is a great scholar. He reads strange tongues, manuscripts from the monasteries of Thibet, the archives of ancient China. He was once a professor at one of your universities—Professor Endacott. He is now of the firm of Johnson and Company.”
The newcomer acknowledged indifferently the young man’s greeting.
“You are looking at a very wonderful piece of carving,” he said. “I once spent a year in Pekin to see that and its companion Image.”
“Young man has other,” Wu Ling explained blandly. “He and friend stole both from temple. This one come here—you know how. The other he has on ship, taking with him to England.”
Endacott’s whole frame seemed to stiffen. He frowned heavily. His tone carried a far-off note of sarcasm, which might have belonged to the days of his professorship.
“The young man has chosen as he would,” he remarked. “He possesses the Body, and here, still in the land which gave it immortality, remains the Soul. Now they are separated. What will you do with your Image, young man, if you reach your country safely?”
“There is a legend of hidden jewels,” was the eager reply. “You perhaps know of it.”
“I know the legend well,” the other admitted. “There is treasure in one, perhaps in both. Which do you think might hold the jewels—the Body or the Soul?”
“I am hoping that there are some in mine, anyhow,” Ballaston answered.
“That may be,” was the tranquil comment. “On the other hand, we may find the whole story to be an allegory. You may discover nothing but emptiness and disappointment in the Body. Here, at least, in the Soul, you find reflected by the divine skill of the craftsman, the jewels of pure living and spiritual thought. You were of Oxford, young man?”
“Magdalen.”
“You have the air. Nearly all of your age and small vision scoff in your hearts at any religion which may seek to express the qualities for which that Image stands. It is your ill-fortune that you have the Body. When you are home you will unpack your case, you will place the Image amongst your treasures, and I can tell you, even though it is thirty years since I saw it, what you will see. You will see a brooding face and eyes cast down to the dunghills. You will see thick lips and coarse features. You will see expressed as glaringly as here you see the triumph of the spirit, the debasement of the body. You will watch your Image and you will sink. You will never look at it, you or others, without conceiving an unworthy thought, just as you could never look upon this one without feeling that some one has stretched down his hand, that somewhere there is a murmur of sweet voices speaking to you from above the clouds.”
“But the jewels!” the young man persisted.
“Bah!” Endacott muttered, as he turned on his heel.
Ballaston, with wondering eyes, watched the erstwhile professor disappear.
“Looney!” he murmured, under his breath.
“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling interpolated politely.
“A madman!”
Wu Ling smiled.
“He is a personage of great learning,” he declared. “He is a friend of Chinese scholars who have never spoken to any other foreigner. He has great knowledge.”
“What are you going to do with that?” Ballaston asked, motioning towards the Image.
Wu Ling sighed. He stood for a moment in silent thought, his eyes fixed upon his treasure. Then gently and almost with reverence he turned away, beckoned his companion to precede him, passed out and locked the door.
“Who can tell?” he ruminated. “We have a great warehouse here filled with strange goods, as you see, another and larger in Alexandria, an agent in New York. All the things come and go. We do not hurry. We have jade there which we have not even spoken of for twenty years, silk robes from the chests of him who was emperor, ivory carvings from his Summer Palace, denied even to the great merchants. Perhaps we sell. Perhaps not.”
“You must be rolling in money,” the young man sighed.
“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling rejoined, mystified.
“You must be wealthy—very rich.”
Wu Ling smiled tolerantly. He turned back, swung open once more the door, and turned on the light. He pointed to the Image, serene and benevolent.
“What counts money?” he murmured.
They were about halfway through the outer warehouse on their way to the lighter room beyond, when a thing happened so amazing that Ballaston stopped short and gripped his companion by the shoulder. Returning towards them was Endacott, and by his side a girl. She was dressed simply enough in the white clothes and shady straw hat which the climate demanded, but there were other things which made her appearance in such a place curiously incongruous. She broke off in her conversation and looked at Gregory Ballaston in frank astonishment. It was certainly an unusual meeting place for two young people of the modern world.
“I am taking my niece to see our new treasure,” Mr. Endacott observed, a little stiffly. “Will you lend me the key, Wu Ling, or will you take us back yourself?”
“I will return,” Wu Ling replied gravely. “The young gentleman will excuse.”
“If I too might be permitted one more glimpse,” Ballaston begged.
The girl smiled at him and glanced at her companion. Mr. Endacott recalled the conventions of his past.
“I should like, my dear,” he said, “to present our young visitor to you, but I am not sure that I remember his name, or that I have even heard it.”
“Ballaston,” the young man interposed, with some eagerness, “Gregory Ballaston.”
“This, then, is my niece, Miss Claire Endacott,” the ex-professor proceeded. “She will be your fellow traveller, I imagine, if you leave on to-morrow’s steamer.”
The two young people shook hands, and they all turned back into the recesses of the warehouse.
“You are coming to England?” Ballaston asked.
She nodded.
“It is so nice to meet some one who is going to be on the ship,” she said. “I came from New York here last month, knowing scarcely a soul.”
After that they remained without speech for a few moments. Somehow or other their surroundings and their mission seemed to demand silence. Wu Ling gravely opened the door and turned up the light. The girl drew a little breath of joy as she gazed at the Image.
“But that is wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“It is the work of a great master,” her uncle explained gravely. “The hand which fashioned that Image was the hand of a man who knew the secrets of the ages, who came as near the knowledge of what eternity means as any man may. There is much to think about—little to speak of.”
Their silence was the silence of entrancement; Ballaston’s attention alone curiously distracted. It was a strange environment for her modern and vivid beauty, this chamber with its clinging odours, its ancient treasures of silk and ivory, the time-defying Image gazing serenely past them. Wu Ling and Endacott himself seemed entirely in the setting; the girl, with her masses of yellow hair and almost eagerly joyous expression, a butterfly wandered by chance into a vault. Yet he had another impression of her before they left. He caught a glimpse of her parted lips, the strained light in her clear, grey eyes, as though in a sense her spiritual self were reaching out towards the allegory of the Image. Then her uncle gave the signal. Wu Ling gravely switched off the light and they trooped back into the warehouse.
“Somehow,” the girl reflected—“I suppose it is because I have just come from the art classes and the museums of New York—I feel as though that were the first real thing I have ever seen in my life.”
“Well,” Claire exclaimed, laughing at Gregory Ballaston across the table, “how have you enjoyed your dinner?”
“Immensely,” he answered, with enthusiasm.
“Have you ever dined more strangely?”
“I don’t think I have,” he confessed. “It was most frightfully kind of your uncle to ask me. I was never so surprised in my life.”
“Nor I,” she admitted candidly. “To tell you the truth, when we all came together in the warehouse this afternoon, it seemed to me from his manner that you were not particularly good friends, and I was afraid he was going to hurry me off without a word. Then your intense curiosity to have another look at that Image——”
“Entirely assumed,” he interrupted. “I wanted a chance to be introduced to you.”
“Of course that wasn’t in the least obvious,” she laughed. “Anyhow, even then I never dreamed of this. It was just when you were going that he asked your name again and seemed so interested. Do you realise that he must know something about you or your family?”
“I wondered,” Gregory admitted.
She glanced at the door through which her uncle had disappeared in search of cigarettes.
“Anyhow,” she continued, “it is delightful to think that you are going to be a fellow passenger on the Kalatat. Don’t you sympathise with me for being rather glad to get away from here?”
He looked around at the almost empty room, at the comfortless linoleum upon the floor, the Chinese servants, moving like ghosts about the table, at the cane-bottomed chairs, the few articles of cheap furniture. It was an amazing environment.
“Your uncle,” he remarked, a little hesitatingly, “apart from his household surroundings, seems to be a man of great taste.”
“He has wonderful knowledge,” she said, “and a wonderful sense of beauty, but he lives absolutely within himself. I am perfectly certain he doesn’t know that he has eaten curried chicken and rice every night for a week. Why, if I hadn’t thought of it, we’d have had nothing but water for dinner.”
“You’re a good Samaritan,” he murmured.
“Come and sit outside,” she invited. “The verandah is the only possible place here. We’re a great deal too near the rest of the houses, but the city looks almost beautiful now the lights are out, and the harbour is wonderful. The chairs, as you will discover, are horrible, and there isn’t a cushion in the place.”
“Tell me about yourself,” he begged, when they were established, “and why you came here.”
“You see,” she confided, “Mr. Endacott’s brother, my father, was a professor at Harvard. He died when I was eleven years old and my mother died a year afterwards. I was sent to boarding school in Boston and New York. When I was nineteen I was to be sent either to an aunt in England or to my uncle here. My aunt in England lives at a place which reminds me of your name—Market Ballaston, it is called.”
He looked at her in astonishment.
“Why, that is where I live!” he exclaimed. “Tell me your aunt’s name?”
“De Fourgenet,” she replied. “She married a Frenchman, the Comte de Fourgenet.”
“Good God! Madame!”
“Madame?”
“That is what we call your aunt in the neighbourhood,” he explained. “She is my father’s greatest friend. You know, of course, that she is an invalid.”
“I have heard so,” the girl admitted. “A motor accident, wasn’t it?... Uncle,” she went on, as he stepped through the window, “do you realise that Mr. Ballaston knows Aunt Angèle?”
“I imagined that he might,” Mr. Endacott acknowledged, a little drily. “It was not until I heard your name for the second time,” he continued, turning to the younger man, “that I realised who you must be.”
“It is a very small world,” Gregory Ballaston remarked tritely, as he accepted one of the cigars which Mr. Endacott was offering.
“Geographically it has contracted for me during the last twenty-five years into a radius of a few miles round the city here,” Mr. Endacott confided. “To come back into the world again at my time of life will seem strange.”
“But you won’t really mind it,” the girl assured him. “You will find a country house not too far from Aunt Angèle, you will have all your manuscripts, your books, your treasures round you. It is true, isn’t it, that you sit in your little office every day without stirring? Why, you can do the same thing in England as here. And then, there must be some of your old Oxford friends who would like to see you.”
Mr. Endacott smiled thinly.
“Thirty years,” he reminded her, “is a long way to look back. To pick up the threads, the friendships dropped more than a quarter of a century ago, is not easy. At the same time,” he went on, “it is right that I should return to England. It marches well with affairs here.”
“You must have found the life out in these parts very interesting, sir,” Gregory Ballaston remarked. “I don’t know whether it would get monotonous to you, but to any one coming upon it suddenly it is an amazing corner of the world. Off the ship, I have only seen three Europeans since I have been here.”
“It is for that reason,” Mr. Endacott pointed out, “an unsuitable place for my niece. My establishment here, too, is impossible. No European woman could keep house under the prevailing conditions. That is why I am hurrying my niece off, although I myself shall follow before long.”
“My father will be interested to see you again,” Gregory ventured.
“Your father, if his tastes had lain that way,” Mr. Endacott ruminated, “might have been a brilliant scholar. He preferred sport and life. We met, not so many years ago, in Pekin. He was dabbling in diplomacy then. He certainly had the gifts for it. He was, in fact, the most popular Englishman who ever appeared at the Court there. He was received and granted privileges where I could never follow him. He was, I suppose, your instigator in this buccaneering expedition of yours.”
The young man laughed a little uneasily. There had been a vein of contempt in the other’s tone.
“I suppose it must have seemed a horrible piece of vandalism to you, sir,” he remarked. “However, there it is. The adventure appealed to me and we wanted the money badly enough.”
His host looked out across the harbour at the swaying lanterns of the small boats and beyond to the great lighthouse.
“Money!” he repeated. “The password of the West. Somehow I never thought I should return to it.”